Essays on Institutions and Inequality

Ranjan, Alok

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130145 Copy

Description

Title

Essays on Institutions and Inequality

Author(s)

Ranjan, Alok

Issue Date

2025-07-07

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Albouy, David

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Albouy, David

Committee Member(s)

• Thornton, Rebecca
• Bartik, Alex
• Borgschulte, Mark

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Judicial Discretion
• Labor Market Dynamics
• Political Participation

Abstract

This dissertation, titled Essays on Institutions and Inequality, brings together three empirical studies that examine how institutional rules and design features shape economic behavior and distributive outcomes. Using large-scale administrative and survey data, each chapter employs quasi-experimental methods to identify causal effects in distinct domains: judicial decision-making, labor market dynamics, and political participation. The first chapter, Judicial Transparency and Criminal Justice (with Felipe Diaz and Anna Kyriazis), investigates how greater public visibility affects judges’ discretionary decisions in criminal courts. Elected judges wield considerable power over monetary sanctions, yet their choices are often shielded from public scrutiny. At the same time, local governments increasingly rely on court-imposed legal financial obligations (LFOs)—fines, fees, and surcharges that disproportionately burden low-income defendants and often yield limited net revenue once enforcement costs are considered. This chapter examines whether transparency can realign judicial behavior with public accountability and distributive goals. Leveraging a policy reform in North Carolina that mandated public reporting of court cost waivers, we employ a regression discontinuity in time design to compare outcomes for defendants sentenced immediately before and after the reform. The findings show that public reporting reduces the likelihood that judges impose court costs, improves the targeting of waivers toward economically vulnerable defendants, and—counterintuitively—may increase total collections by enhancing payment compliance. The results highlight how transparency, under the right institutional conditions, can improve both equity and fiscal efficiency in the criminal justice system. The second chapter, Labor Market Dynamics of New Mothers (with Mark Borgschulte and Rebecca Thornton), explores the short-run and medium-run labor market responses to childbirth. Childbirth marks a pivotal turning point in women's labor market trajectories, yet most data sources obscure when and how these disruptions begin. Using restricted-access data from the American Community Survey (ACS) linked to the Census Household Composition Key (CHCK), we construct a novel event-time dataset that tracks parents’ employment patterns month-by-month over a 48-month window centered on childbirth (–24 to +24 months). We document that maternal employment begins declining as early as six months before birth, with nearly 60\% of the total decline occurring prior to delivery—a “pregnancy penalty” that precedes most postpartum-focused policy interventions. These early exits are steepest among non-White and non-college-educated mothers, but these groups also exhibit faster post-birth recovery, in contrast to the slower rebound observed for White and college-educated mothers. Fathers’ labor market outcomes, by contrast, remain stable across this same window. We then examine whether workplace breastfeeding accommodations introduced under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) improved maternal labor supply. Exploiting variation in prior state-level mandates, we find no evidence that the ACA provisions affected mothers’ employment or timing of return to work. The third chapter, Jurisdiction Size and Political Participation, examines how the size of local political jurisdictions influences voter turnout and candidate selection. I leverage a quasi-natural experiment in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where a population threshold rule exogenously determined the size of over 50,000 local government units. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that a 10% increase in jurisdiction size leads to a 0.6% decline in voter turnout in local elections. While the number of contesting candidates increases with electorate size, the quality of candidates and the characteristics of winners do not vary systematically. I also test the rational choice model of voting by simulating millions of elections and show that voter turnout increases with the probability of being pivotal. Together, these chapters offer new insights into how institutional features influence individual behavior and shape economic and civic outcomes. The analysis spans transparency mandates in criminal courts, regulatory protections in the labor market, and the structure of democratic governance. By identifying how public institutions affect decisions related to justice, employment, and participation, the dissertation contributes to policy debates on institutional accountability, labor market policy, and democratic engagement.

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130145

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Alok Ranjan

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